Read "Rough Music, Edinburgh, 1829" by Leslie Adrienne Miller

Why shouldn't Dr. Knox have invited

his painter friend to view the body

of the girl he knew was too fresh

for legitimate death, her "handsome"

limbs and alabaster waist a crime

to cut before at least one brush

could render her unscathed on paper?

Had she been any less an odalisque,

perhaps he wouldn't have needed to collude

with artists or waste good whiskey

to keep the cream in her hips, her purpled

lips all the more arresting than they'd been

in life. If he'd found her sooner and living

would he have known all this was there

for purchase? Would he have offered

to keep her in dresses and tea for peeks?

In the weeks after Hare had turned

King's evidence on Burke and the latter's

convicted corpse was flayed and offered up

to forty thousand pairs of public eyes,

Knox refused to speak. Though by report

she'd been delivered to Surgeon's Square

still warm and clutching twopence-halfpenny

someone paid to bed her, they cut her hair

before she cooled, and Mary swam three

months in whiskey before they took her skin

apart to look inside. When the story broke,

an angry mob came after Knox with noise,

an opera of whistles, pots and pans,

and tore his effigy to shreds in Newington

outside his house. And if in Mary Paterson

a child had taken root, no one would be the wiser

if Knox had kept the little lyric of it to himself,

scion fathered by the Scottish city's lust,

gift to men of science, and so also to me,

woman of the new world digging through

old books to resurrect her murdered parts,

to offer her my own rough music, the strange

collusion of imaginary science and real art.